Forever Young
by chunkiechunder
Summary: The day Light Yagami woke up in his own bed, aged seventeen, with all his memories of Death Note, L, Near and his own death intact, was both a blessing and a curse... Putting a twist on the cliché. Spoilers.


**A/N: Written AGES ago, found it on my computer randomly, and thought I'd publish it here for your amusement. Not the greatest in the originality department, but I hope you enjoy nonetheless. **

**Reviews are welcome. **

**EDIT (25/01/12): I've found the fic that inspired me to write this one, and thought I'd better give credit, since the concept is eerily similar and I really hate to have ripped off someone else's work.**

**So a tip o' my hat to esama's **_**Sisyphus**_** from Harry Potter fandom; **_**Forever Young**_** wouldn't exist without it.**

**WARNING: Spoilers for everything, a tiiiiiny mention of slash and language.**

**So here it is, un-betaed, only slightly revised:**

**Forever Young**

The day Light Yagami woke up in his own bed, aged seventeen, with all his memories of Death Note, L, Near and his own death intact, was both a blessing and a curse. Somewhat used to the abnormalities in life, he accepted his return to life as a second chance to remake his perfect world. And so, on his first return to life, he retrieved the Death Note from the same spot as the first time, and immediately wrote four names in it: L Lawliet, Quillsh Wammy, Nate River and Mihael Keehl.

Then, as Kira, he punished and judged the criminals until one by one, his words became law and nobody dared to stand up to his power. Ryuk once again became his constant companion, silently possessing Light as he went about his business as God of the New World, Misa and her Shinigami Eyes by his side. Light, engrossed in the creation of his world, failed to note that the Shinigami had long since stopped laughing his odd laughter at his 'work' and so, it came as an unexpected surprise when he died of a heart attack, aged thirty-two.

He woke up in his bed, once again seventeen. Determined to do things right this time, he picked up the Death Note and killed L, Watari and his heirs and began to reconstruct his world while concentrating on keeping Ryuk entertained. Walking home from school one day, he caught sight of his house going up in flames; someone had triggered his fake-bottom drawer trap. Before he could do anything, his Death Note burned to ash, leaving him with no memories and no way to provide any more entertainment for Ryuk.

And so he died for the third time, and woke up as a seventeen-year-old yet again, frustrated.

During his fourth reincarnation, he killed Near and Mello, but kept L alive so as to help keep Ryuk entertained. He watched with a smirk as Lind L. Tailor posed as L, but left him alive and well. He waited a few months until L put together enough puzzle pieces to arrive in Japan, and asked his father if he could join the task force to help catch Kira. With L by his side and no suspicion on himself, he started letting his guard down until he was foolishly caught on camera, writing names down on Death Note.

He was tried in public, found guilty of several hundred murders, and received the death sentence. Ryuk killed him the day before his execution.

For the fifth time he woke up, wondering how to get it right, and not get killed himself. He picked up his Death Note and started killing criminals. When Lind L. Tailor appeared, he purposefully played into L's hands, killing the criminal. He met Misa, the second Kira, and Rem the Shinigami. He went into confinement, gave up his memories, and regained them, killing Higuchi. He watched Rem kill Watari and L, took the detective's place and acted his part until Near appeared to challenge him. He used Mikami and Takada as his pawns once again, but at the last moment, told Mikami explicitly not to act if Takada gets in trouble.

He emerged victorious at the Yellow Box Warehouse, and started his rule as Kira. Misa died a year or so later, so he was forced to keep Mikami close to use the Eyes.

It was with stunned disbelief that he succumbed to death, aged thirty, by the betrayal of his pawn, who had decided to become God himself, rather than follow Light around blindly.

Sixth life: he watched from a distance as another student picked up the Death Note, and went home, feeling oddly empty and free at the same time.

That night he suffered an unexpected heart attack, killed by the classmate that had been jealous of his looks and intelligence.

Seventh life dawned exactly the same as the last. Deciding that he was better off with the Death Note than without, he picked it up, but did nothing with it, ignoring Ryuk and his pestering until the Shinigami wrote his name down in order to find a more interesting owner.

He had had enough on his eighth life. He grabbed the Death Note and immediately burned it, and lived a relatively normal, boring life without his memories until he became depressed at the world that seemed to be so beneath him. Depression wore him down until he eventually took his own life, aged twenty-five.

Waking up again as seventeen, he left for school lost in thought as to how to make his life perfect. Too busy pondering his past eight lives, he walked straight into racing traffic, dying instantly on impact. His ninth life was his shortest so far.

On his tenth life, he ran away from home, Death Note in hand, and lived a wild, thrilling life of a criminal until he was tracked down by L. He was killed in a high speed chase that reminded him vividly of Yotsuba Kira's end.

On his eleventh life, he contacted L by hacking into Interpol, and told him everything from his first life and death to his tenth, and was immediately sent to a mental hospital to be restrained as highly dangerous and unstable.

He woke up to his twelfth life, vowing to find more painless way to kill himself next time. Carefully calculating his life and deaths so far, he did everything exactly as he was supposed to until he went into confinement. There he refused to give up his memories of being Kira and handcuffed himself to the detective while possessing his full memories. Two weeks later L, whom he had thought sleeping, overheard him conversing with Ryuk and tried to arrest him. They got into a fight, for Light would never go down without one, and Matsuda's warning shot misfired, the bullet imbedding itself in Light's neck, killing him instantly.

His thirteenth life was as unlucky as the number. He had gotten as far as to meeting Misa when Rem decided to kill him before the blonde girl could get any more attached to him. Fourteenth life, he managed to seduce L and enjoyed a brief relationship with him before getting assassinated by none other than Watari. Fifteenth life saw him killing Watari first thing out of revenge for the previous life (because it _did_ hurt, getting stabbed to death), and then throwing the Death Note into the rubbish bin. Sayu retrieved the notebook and became a clumsy Kira before killing herself, unable to handle the guilt of murdering. Light lived an aimless life as his parents fell into despair and finally ended his own life by hanging himself in his room.

He no longer kept record of his numerous lives. In one he wheedled his parents into letting him go on an exchange student program to England, tracked down a certain orphanage, and set fire to the Wammy's House for the sake of it. L tracked him down obsessively for that and he killed himself with the Death Note just before he could get arrested. In another, he got Misa pregnant the day they met and was killed by one of her extreme stalker fans. Once he trashed his school and got expelled, then went on a killing spree until he was shot down by a police man. In his thirtieth life, he distributed the pages of Death Note to his classmates and watched, amused, as random people began to drop dead around the country before eventually his name was written out in one of them.

In his forty-fourth life, he figured out another way to kill a Shinigami and killed Ryuk as a revenge for killing him so many times that he had lost count. After killing Rem and Sidoh for the sake of it, he was killed by another Shinigami, aged eighteen.

During his fiftieth life he used the Death Note to kill his parents and Sayu, and went into the Wammy's House where he lived a surprisingly peaceful life before Near discovered his Death Note and the names of his family written into it. He was tried and found guilty, and spent a week in prison before asking Ryuk to kill him.

The next life he asked Ryuk if he knew anything that would stop the constant time loop (the answer was a bewildered no, of course; the Shinigami had looked at him as if he was mentally unstable). He spent twenty years of his life researching the supernatural and the workings of time, alternate dimensions and everything related to it before one of his experiments to open a wormhole went wrong. Crippled, he wrote his own name in the notebook, vowing never to try such a thing again.

In his seventieth life, Light got a flash of inspiration and wrote the following in the Death Note:

_Light Yagami – dies a peaceful death at 7:30 a.m. and does not come back to life, EVER._

It was with immense frustration that he once again woke up to the sinfully bright morning.

For the next few lives, Light played the role of an immature school boy, throwing the Death Note at Ryuk and telling him to piss off, that it was his fault, that all he wanted was to have a normal life and just – fucking – _die_. Needless to say, the Shinigami was quite happy to help him get his wish every time.

By the time he woke up to his eighty-seventh life, he was sick of having heart attacks. Dragging some resemblance of his old determination back to his mind, he dutifully picked up his Death Note and played around with it until Ryuk appeared. After killing several hundred criminals, he impulsively went to his father and confessed to his being Kira, just to see how he would react.

Not well, apparently.

He meekly let himself be locked in his room until his father could think of something to fix his son's mass-murdering god-complex, and proceeded to give himself an easy way out.

His ninety-ninth life was spent controlling people to do very amusing things with the Death Note, laughing almost hysterically with Ryuk until, having made no effort to hide himself, he was captured by the police and then, as usual, killed by Ryuk.

His hundredth life and Light Yagami gave up. He picked up his Death Note, read through the rules he knew better than his own name and even _screamed_ when he met Ryuk, whose sight was more familiar than his reflection in the mirror. He killed Lind L. Tailor and listened to L's taunt, the gothic old English letter as well-known to him as the Death Note itself.

He did everything with methodical neatness; he bribed Ryuk to search the room for the 64 cameras he could pinpoint blindfolded; he bought the 39, 800 yen mini-TV to fool L's cameras; he got full marks in his entrance exam, and addressed the crowd with 'Hideki Ryuga' by his side; he played and won the tennis match, then suffered through the joke of an interrogation he had long-since memorised; he pretended to work on the 'second Kira' case with all seriousness, met and talked to Misa in words he had repeated dozens of times before; he willingly went into confinement, giving up the notebook after a week; even memory-less, he mirrored his previously-done actions like a rehearsed play, down to the last letter of a conversation.

He got his memories back and watched Rem kill L and Quillsh Wammy, feeling no satisfaction. He accepted the task force members' requests to be the next L. He played the role as he had so many lives ago, and continued killing the same criminals he had killed so many times before. He indulged Near in his little mind game when he appeared, watched his father dying with faked panic. He sent Ryuk off to Mikami when it became necessary, and allowed his pawn to kill people in his stead. He dated Takada while stringing along Misa and ignored the mistrustful looks of Mogi and Aizawa.

Light killed Takada like a computer programmed to do so, and agreed easily to the showdown at the Yellow Box Warehouse. He met up with the albino he had seen and killed so many times in the past, heard the words that he had engraved in his mind.

His act had been perfect up to this point, but he gave them all up now.

He watched, emotionless, as Mikami called him his God, looking like the madman he was.

He watched, impassive, as the task force members clenched their eyes shut in fear of death.

He watched, blankly, as Near elaborated on the so-called ingenious final plan that was so _old_ to him it was almost _funny_.

Near was a good observer. The boy noticed the complete lack of response from Kira, and spoke up, his soft voice piercing through Matsuda's disbelieving mumblings.

"Why so still, Kira? Are you in shock?"

And Light looked up, his honey-eyes dead, dull, and blank.

"Shock?" he repeated. "Nothing in this life, Near, I assure you, can ever shock me, ever again."

The utter confidence in his voice silenced Near. The albino could see that Kira wasn't being arrogant. He was speaking matter-of-factly, stating a simple, _irrefutable_ truth. And he sounded so _tired_... so very tired and weary...

"What's happened to you, Light Yagami?" he whispered.

Light smiled humourlessly. "Would you believe me if I told you?"

The rest of the men in the room were silent, watching the two genii with wide eyes.

"I die, Near," Light said dazedly. "I die. And then I wake up again in the morning of November 28th, 2003."

"No," Matsuda gasped.

"Yes." Light paused. "This is my hundredth life."

"Hundredth!" Aizawa yelled, stumbling away from him and raising his gun. "You're mental!"

"Shoot me, then," Light challenged, uninterested. "Shoot me. Kill me. Do whatever the _fuck_ you want with me – and I'll see you in the next life."

And then Light laughed. It was one of those situations where you either laugh or cry – so he laughed. The sudden ridiculousness of the situation hit him _hard_, and he doubled over, grasping the sleeves of the shirt he had worn a thousand times and still _laughing_ –

And the familiar pain in his heart came, and he knew that Ryuk had killed him again, the bastard. He fell, twitching with intense pain yet still snickering helplessly...

"Jeez, Light," Ryuk said, amazed, "I didn't know you were such a wack-job."

And with that, Light's eyes closed, his breath coming in quick bursts before they stopped altogether. Silence, and only silence remained in the Yellow Box Warehouse as a heart fluttered to a halt, leaving them wondering, despite themselves, whether somewhere, sometime, Light Yagami was really waking up again, seventeen years old.


End file.
